Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 81

Chapter 81: I’m Sorry, Baby. Tell Her. Tell—

Blair Drakencrest entered her brother’s chambers on a deadline.

She walked between Kael and Jaxon without acknowledging either. The cold shoulder was deliberate, sustained, and executed with the precision of a woman who had been practicing it since childhood.

Kael noticed. His iron eyes tracked her across the room with mild irritation.

"Still upset about the dark magic incident, I see."

Blair did not respond. She moved toward Maddox’s closet with her chin up and her jaw locked.

"If I wanted you dead, Blair, you would be dead. The blade situation was theatre. I have explained this multiple times. To multiple people. The repetition is getting tedious."

Blair opened the closet without turning around. The silence she gave him was so aggressively pointed it could have drawn blood.

Kael rolled his eyes and returned to Jaxon. "Fine. Where were we?"

The closet was organized in a way that communicated Maddox’s priorities. His side was functional, dark leathers and formal coats and battle suits arranged by purpose. The other side was hers.

Blair knew exactly what she was looking for. The garment bag was zipped and hanging at the far end. Maddox had commissioned it for Guinevere a week ago. The man had been grinning like a fool when he did.

She exited the closet with the garment bag over one arm and the cloak over the other.

"Blair."

Maddox was sitting upright, his gold eyes tracking her movement.

"Why do you have that?" He was looking at the bag. The recognition was partial, the expression of a man who knew the object but couldn’t connect it to a context.

"It’s for Gwen, Maddox." Blair held his gaze. "Go look at your closet. You filled half of it with things for her the day she arrived here."

Ryker gave her a warning look from across the room. Blair caught it. She wasn’t sure if it was because Kael was present or if it was something else. She filed it and kept moving.

Maddox’s face contorted. The expression that crossed it was the same one he had worn this morning, a visceral rejection that lived somewhere deeper than thought. His lip curled a fraction.

"Who?"

Blair’s jaw tightened. She had expected this. Expecting it and experiencing it were different things.

"The woman you tried to have arrested this morning." Her voice was flat. The flatness was a wall she was building in real time between what she felt and what she was willing to show.

When Blair said "arrested," Maddox went still. For one second, something behind his gold eyes looked sick, genuinely sick, the way a man looks when he’s done something terrible and the memory of it arrives before the context does.

Then it was gone. Buried. Whatever had surfaced, the dark magic pulled it back down.

He looked at Jaxon and Aldric. "What is she talking about?"

Neither answered quickly enough for Blair, who was already moving again.

"I need your wife’s crown. The one she was wearing the night you brought her here."

"I don’t have a wife."

The lanterns above the bed sputtered. No one reacted.

"Yes you do, Maddox. But humor me, if you brought a princess back to your chambers for a hookup, where would you put her crown?"

Maddox thought about it. "I’ve never brought a princess back here."

"Have you seen a white gold crown that is not yours, Maddox?"

"You are talking to me like I’m an idiot, Blair. No. I didn’t hook up with a princess who left her crown here."

"Could have fooled me," Blair called, beyond done with this. She crossed towards his study and pushed open the double doors without apology. "I have forty-five minutes to create a masterpiece, Maddox. And you are actively unhelpful."

Kael’s face held nothing. The words crown and princess didn’t make him blink. Ryker rubbed a hand down his face.

Blair moved through the room, ignoring Maddox’s perplexed expression because she did not have time for this.

The study was small, attached to the chambers, the private workspace of a king who did his real thinking behind a closed door.

The crown was on the desk. A thin circlet of white gold, the one Guinevere had worn when she walked into a hall full of kings and changed the trajectory of two continents.

Blair picked it up.

Then she saw the letters.

Three of them. Spread across the desk in the careless arrangement of documents that had been read and set down and forgotten.

Her face fell.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify